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Space rocket pioneers leave Earth's orbit for ever

By Alan Hale

For the Daily News

Posted:
07/10/2014 09:32:08 PM MDT

The road to our understanding of the universe around us has been built by many individuals who have devoted their life's work, and their life's passion, to this cause. As is, unfortunately, always true as time inexorably marches forward, there come occasions when we must say farewell to those who have participated in building that road.

Within the past few weeks, two of these individuals have left us, and while their respective contributions were in quite different fields, they have nevertheless left their marks for those of us who remain after them. By an interesting coincidence, both of these individuals were named William – Bill, obviously, to their friends and colleagues.

William "Bill" Bradfield was born in New Zealand, and relocated to near Adelaide, South Australia during the 1950s to begin working as a rocket propulsion engineer for the Australian Department of Defence. A life long amateur astronomer, he was inspired by the brilliant Comet Bennett that appeared in early 1970 to try to discover a comet of his own, and he began a formal program for looking for comets at the beginning of the following year. He scored his first success a little over a year later, and two years later found his second comet, which became visible to the naked eye during the — northern hemisphere's — spring months in 1974.

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This Comet Bradfield helped soothe the feelings of the sky-watchers who had been disappointed by the showing of the (in)famous Comet Kohoutek a few months earlier, and was also one of the first comets that exhibited evidence of water within its chemical composition.

Bradfield continued hunting for comets in the years after that and racked up success after success, at one point discovering two comets within a span of two weeks. While none of his comets would be considered great comets, several of them, including his second, became relatively easy objects to see with the unaided eye. His last comet, which he discovered in March 2004, was one of these; after passing close to the sun and becoming quite bright as seen in spacecraft images of the near-sun vicinity, it later briefly became visible in the northern hemisphere's morning sky as a fairly bright object with a long filmy tail.

In all, Bradfield discovered 18 comets, all found by visually looking through the eyepiece of a telescope — or in the case of one of his brighter comets, through binoculars. One unique facet of his discoveries is that each of his comets bears his name alone. Most of these are what are called long-period comets, i.e., they will return only after several centuries or millennia. Two of them are what could be called short-period comets: one of these, which he discovered in early 1984, will return after about 150 years, and the other, which he found five years later, will return after about 82 years. A third one, which he found in late 1979, has an orbital period of about 290 years.

Bill Bradfield passed away June 9, at the age of 86. His total of 18 visual comet discoveries is among the highest for anyone in history, and will quite likely never be approached again, especially in these days of the automated sky survey programs that utilize electronic detectors. The last visual comet discovery, in fact, took place almost four years ago, and as long as the survey programs are operational very few comets are likely to be found visually within the foreseeable future.

The other departed space road-builder, William "Bill" Gaubatz, was also a rocket engineer. While working for McDonnell Douglas Aerospace during the early 1990s Gaubatz, together with former astronaut Charles "Pete" Conrad, led a small but dedicated team of engineers that developed an experimental prototype single-stage-to-orbit rocket called the Delta Clipper – Experimental, or DC-X. After building the DC-X in less than two years – and under budget – Gaubatz and his team began a series of test flights for the vehicle from White Sands Missile Range in southern New Mexico in 1993.

While the DC-X was never designed to reach orbit, or even sub-orbital space for that matter, it demonstrated a low-cost and full reusability concept that was not the norm, or even seriously considered, for space operations at that time. Gaubatz constantly and consistently championed a vision for the future that, based upon the successes of the DC-X, utilized a low-cost approach to space access that routinely carried both cargo and passengers on frequent trips to destinations on the other side of our planet in less than an hour, to Earth orbit, and eventually to destinations beyond Earth, such as to the moon and to Mars.

Among his many activities in support of that vision, Gaubatz was a senior advisor for the X-Prize Foundation, was one of the early pioneers who have helped turn Spaceport American here in New Mexico from a dream into a reality, and a decade ago cofounded the International Symposium on Personal and Commercial Spaceflight, an annual series of conferences held each October in Las Cruces. Meanwhile, his legacy lives on in many of today's efforts, which includes companies like Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, which already carries supplies to the International Space Station and hopes to be carrying astronauts to and from there within the next few years, and Virgin Galactic, which plans to carry passengers on sub-orbital rides to space within the next year.

Bill Gaubatz passed away July 5. It is unfortunate that he did not live long enough to see his full vision come to fruition, but those of us who remain behind can bring it about, and when such time comes as we see rockets carrying passengers out of Spaceport America, or see astronauts riding to the International Space Station aboard commercial rockets, we can pay tribute to the visionary who helped make it happen.

Alan Hale is a professional astronomer who resides in Cloudcroft. He is involved in various space-related research and educational activities throughout New Mexico and elsewhere. His web site is http://earthriseinstitute.org

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